Museum shows immigrants' transition to American life

This museum in northern Wisconsin is a living museum, showing life as it was in the middle 1800s.    - - Donna Poisl

By Wayne Anderson

We took a step back in time at Old World Wisconsin, an outdoor living museum near Eagle, Wis., with costumed actors performing the tasks of the early settlers who began to immigrate here from northern Europe starting in the 1840s. The Wisconsin Historical Society has collected more than 50 buildings from around the state built by different immigrant groups and distributed them in naturalistic settings at this 576-acre site. Some, including the Crossroads Village and the German farming areas, have many buildings, and others, such as the black American and Polish areas, have only a building or two.

Crops of the period were growing in the fields when we were there in early August. The original immigrants focused on wheat, wool and the dairy products for which Wisconsin later became noted. The typical animals the settlers would have had were in the fields and barns, including two large black oxen, which at times are used to pull equipment but on our visit were basking in the shade. At threshing time, horses would walk on a treadmill to run the threshing machine, which separated grain from stalks and husks.
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